


Zen and the Art of Terminator Maintenance

by UrbanAmazon



Category: Terminator (Movies), Terminator - All Media Types, Terminator Salvation (2009)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Existential Crisis, M/M, Metal kink, Slow Burn, coming to terms with the apocalypse, john connor has so many damn issues, machine body horror, sort of, time travel messes with your head
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2017-05-15
Packaged: 2018-07-12 01:19:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7078588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrbanAmazon/pseuds/UrbanAmazon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For John Connor, the apocalypse came with a user’s manual, of a sort.  Marcus Wright didn’t get anything like that, and has to figure it out on his own.</p>
<p>Well.  Not quite on his own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Metal

**Author's Note:**

> This is all brodinsons' fault.

Once upon a time, Marcus Wright fractured his goddamn arm.  It didn’t hurt at first, just felt hot and sore like a bad bruise, and he’d had plenty of those before. Then his brother got to where he’d landed in the dirt and hauled him out from under the dirtbike, swearing at him for trying to pull such a stupid jump and if he busted the bike Marcus was going to fucking _die_.  Everything went all white in Marcus’ eyes and ears, and all he could concentrate on was that sensation of bone _grinding_ against itself.  It drilled up into his teeth and down into his stomach until he folded in half and puked on the ground, coughing and spitting instead of screaming.  He’d held his arm close against his chest until everything was just hot and throbbing and tolerable again, and the bike wasn’t trashed, just scuffed up on one side.  

Marcus got a cast, and was grounded for six months.  His brother didn’t get _shit_.  He can’t even remember how old he was when that happened, fourteen or fifteen.  Maybe thirteen.  Funny how it comes to mind now.  

The safezone is like a kicked-up anthill as the sun starts to set, and the reek of chemical smoke has its claws in everyone’s clothes, their skin, their hair.  Some of the pilots are hunched in corners with masks pressed to their face, sucking clean oxygen from precious tanks.  A few people are shot.  A few are burned.  Less wounded than dead, and the dead are already being carried away for burial.  Techs and soldiers scuttle, kicking up sand as they carry bits to refuel or repair, and Marcus feels their eyes sliding over him.  

Well.  Part of him.  He clenches his left hand at his side and the metal phalanges grind together, grind like diamond dust stuck somewhere in the joints and he feels it all the way up into his ribcage.  His skull.  His teeth.

All the things that should hurt, and don’t… like waking up when he thought he was done, and deserved to be done.  Again.

There’s a sick black bruise creeping up his chest where a metal fist stopped his heart, and the itch of burns where high voltage got it started again.  There’s the dull ache of the cuts where Kate sliced her way in until someone could get some kind of acetylene torch against his sternum and ribs.  There’s a shivery spark every few minutes at the back of his skull where he ripped out that fucking cortex chip, and Marcus can’t tell if it’s that or his clothes carrying the charred smell.  

And he’s not even going to fucking start on the fact that his skin isn’t even bleeding where it stops covering his hand.  It’s not like he has a heart to pump blood anymore, anyway.

So… what?  What does that make him?  Does he wait his turn for stitches and whatever passes for antibiotics?  Or does he hope for a sympathetic engineer or technician to give him a once-over and a bit of engine grease now that his coltan ribs are back in alignment?  

 _Fat chance of that_ , he admits quietly.  The only one that would likely do that without gun to his head is Blair, and she’s needed with prepping the helicopters to move ASAP, the moment the fuel convoy arrives.  Kyle and Star are getting a hot meal for once in their stubborn and ragged lives.  Maybe even some sleep.

Leaving Marcus sitting on his ass in the med tent with his _second_ stolen Resistance jacket around his shoulders and just stew on it.  At least he’s not chained again, not even tethered by an IV or handcuffed, for all the good it would do, but at least he’d know what to make of himself from that, instead of just _waiting_ \--

A sharp, short whistle yanks his head around.  Even with only one good eye, John Connor manages a commanding glare from where he’s laid out on the best cot the Resistance can offer.  He twitches his fingers at Marcus, wincing as stitches and fresh scabs pull warningly, then jerks his chin over at the empty crate that was serving as a bedside chair for Kate as he came out from the anaesthetic.  “Get over here already,” he rasps.

Huh.  

Marcus goes over slowly, warily.  As much as it grates on him to have most everyone else look at him like some unwelcome stray, at least they’re obvious about it.  He sees fear as much as hate in their eyes, some of them muttering ‘ _metal_ ’ like a slur.  Connor… Marcus can’t read him right, not yet.  

Not since they stared each other down at the river’s edge.

Connor has his his right hand palm up and waiting against the bandages wrapping his battered chest.  “Let me look at that.  Sounds like shit, there’s probably something jammed somewhere.”  Connor’s fingers curl and release impatiently.  Maybe he’s still half out of his mind from whatever drugs are used in open heart surgery in the field, but he raises an eyebrow at Marcus, for fuck’s sake, until Marcus finally gives up and puts his bared hand right there in Connor’s weak grip.

There’s no hesitation in touching the metal.  Connor pushes back the burned and melted edge of the sleeve, prods at the raw skin underneath.  “How’d this happen?  Was it the hot coltan?”  He follows the lines of Marcus’ metacarpals with his fingertips, finds the knuckles, frowns at the shape of the phalanges with this frustrated little squint like they’re not quite what he expects.  

A little over forty eight hours ago, this man was a twitch away from putting a bullet in Marcus’ beating heart.  Marcus thinks he can still feel it; perhaps it’s just Connor’s new pulse pressing from his fingertips into the metal.  The power cell they shoved into Marcus’ chest to take its place is quiet as the grave.  Probably Connor’s idea.  Marcus hasn’t decided if that was a favor or not, not yet.  He certainly doesn’t remember being fucking _asked._

He doesn’t say anything.  

“There’s some... shit stuck somewhere in here,” Connor continues, as if he didn’t expect an answer in the first place.  He frowns like he’s visualizing some kind of blueprint in his head, then tries to move before another wince cuts the motion short.  “Knife.  My right boot.”  

Marcus reaches for the small folding knife, distantly amused by the deja vu despite how fucking surreal this is.  He pulls it open for Connor with one hand and his teeth, and without so much as a pardon, Connor starts gently digging at the spaces between the sectioned joints.  “Impure coltan’s brittle,” he says.  “Cooled and solidified in there.  Or maybe you picked it up in the fight.”

Between the bullet in his shoulder, the fresh scar over his eye, and enough blunt force trauma to fuck up a linebacker, and oh yes, the _recent heart transplant_ , Connor’s on at least _three_ of the last painkillers still known to man, but the knife’s point barely shakes.  It grazes lightly against the metal bones, the smaller wires and finely segmented tubing, then catches on the tiny grains and chips stuck in between and flicks them out.  Marcus feels each one, feels the vibrations all the way up his metal arm and down his metal spine.  

It takes forty minutes, maybe longer.  There’s bits caught in his fingers, his knuckles, and a chip of polished metal was jammed up in Marcus’ wrist.  Connor looks even more exhausted by the end, pale as the clean linen against his skin, but nods with satisfaction when Marcus makes a slow fist.  The grinding noise is gone.

He closes the knife and leaves it in Marcus’ hand, then carefully relaxes back against the stretcher and shuts his eyes.

The shadows creep forward with the cold of evening and night.  Marcus stays, turns the folded knife over in his hands, metal and flesh.  He tries to reconcile Connor’s sudden quiet, efficient familiarity with that cold hate that had introduced them, and all that snarled bullshit about being at war before they’d been born, about Kyle Reese and Skynet and Sarah Connor like some fucked up riddle that won’t let the wheels of his head settle.  

“You’ve done that before,” he says, but he’s not sure where that part fits.  

But Connor’s already out, dead tired.  


	2. Memory

Smoke still rises on the horizon, from what’s left of San Francisco to burn.  It’s too far away to smell, or perhaps it’s just because  _ everything _ smells like smoke already.  Marcus’ ears can pick out the individual grumbles and roars of every engine the Resistance manages to get running, can spot a glint of metal on the horizon if he squints at it, but smoke smells like smoke smells like smoke.  For a bit of time when he was walking that long stretch of dead highway into Los Angeles, he thought he might’ve lost his sense of smell completely.

Two day old coyote sure as hell cured that illusion, for better or worse.

He’s come to the conclusion that his sense of smell is just as average as anyone else’s, which isn’t as reassuring as he’d first thought; he can’t imagine why a robot would bother with a sense of smell, but perhaps that meant it was something that could still decay and be lost.  Maybe one day he’ll wake up and all he’ll smell is the ashes of the apocalypse, whether that’s all that’s left or not.  

_ Smells _

It’s one of the many things on a list in his head, the one that’s sometimes called ‘Apocalypse Shit’, sometimes ‘Fuck You Skynet’, sometimes… sometimes just ‘The List’.  

_ No cold beer _

_ Shit roads _

_ Landmines _

_ No ketchup _

_ Sunburns _

_ Lost music _

_ Poisoned water  _

Marcus has a lot of time to put things on The List.

Once they’ve settled in a new base, everyone gets put to work.  This time, ‘everyone’ means Marcus, too, though it’s still a crapshoot as to whether the Resistance trust him, let alone like him.  With his (terminator) eyes and (terminator) ears, they put him in one of the lookout towers with a radio and an antique rifle.

There’s still something in Marcus’ gut that twists uncomfortably when he holds a gun in his hands, something that remembers his brother and bloody police uniforms, and it’s the most human Marcus has felt in fucking forever.  He swallows the memory of bile in his throat and climbs the tower, which is a twisted power-line frame that hasn’t carried electricity in decades, rather like the one where he met Blair.  He settles himself in a diamond of metal beams, braces the scope against his eye, and listens for the hum of aerostats.  The radio crackles to check in every half hour, like a heartbeat.    

_ Rationing _

_ No trees _

_ The quiet _

The quiet is the worst.  No one ever talks about ‘before’; whoever they were, whatever they did, whatever they lost all goes unspoken, and at least that much Marcus gets.  There’s no point in talking about things that’ll never come back.  He learned that on death row, figures it’s pretty much the same here.  Now.  Whatever.

John Connor’s the exception.  Of course he’s the exception.  Maybe it’s a matter of battlefield psychology, reminding everyone of what Skynet took, every loss that necessitates revenge.  Maybe it’s to fill everyone’s ears with human chatter instead of machine static, staving off madness.  Whatever his reasons, John Connor has a serious inability to  _ shut the hell up. _

“ _ When’s the last time anyone on this channel had pancakes? _ ”

Marcus’ teeth grind together like a fucking reflex.  He breathes out and focuses on the horizon, a slow sweep from north-east to north-west, and every different shade of gray smoke that used to be San Francisco.  

“ _ Check on channel three?  Is that Connor? _ ”

“ _ Connor here.  You saying you’ve got pancakes, Tech-comm? _ ”

“ _ No, sir. _ _ Been a long time since I had pancakes, sir. _ ”

Another lookout’s voice joins the conversation, raspy from disuse.  “ _ Scouts found a box of frozen waffles last sweep.  Should’ve called it sooner, sir _ .”

“ _ I said pancakes, Mendes.  Those are  _ not _ pancakes _ .”

It’s not until Marcus hears the creak of a metal frame in one ear and the radio echo in the other that Marcus realizes Connor’s  _ there _ , climbing up to settle in opposite Marcus like he’s supposed to be there instead of down in the command room with his maps and tactics and leadership bullshit.  He’s breathing a little hard but trying not to show it, just like his fingers twitch with the want to grasp at the still-healing scars on his chest.  

“Pancakes,” he repeats again, like he could fucking will them into being.  “With butter.  And hot syrup.  The whole stack smells so good it drags you to the kitchen before you’re even awake.”

“...  _ with chocolate syrup _ ,” Mendes puts in, and Marcus tries not to roll his eyes.  The quiet’s bad, but all Marcus can remember with perfect clarity is the heated blobs of liquid cardboard that the California State Prison System called pancakes, so fuck you Skynet  _ and _ John Connor.  

“ _ I put applesauce on mine, sir _ .”

“Good one, Tech-Comm.  The perfect breakfast.  Better than any mortal man deserves.”

“ _ Then maybe that’s why we don’t have any fucking pancakes.  Sir. _ ”

“ _ What does that even  _ mean,  _ Connor? _ ”

He laughs, a huff of air that doesn’t have a wince underneath for once.  “It’s something Sarah used to say.”

The soft tap of one of the other lookouts joining the conversation, and it’s Kyle’s sleepy voice doing his best to stay awake.  “ _ Who’s Sarah? _ ”

“My mother.  Sarah.”  It’s Marcus’ metal-sharp ears that catch the sound of tongue touching soft palate, more words caught and buried before Connor lets them out.  He glances sideways out of the rifle’s scope; Connor’s face has relaxed and his eyes are focused somewhere much further than the horizon.  

Marcus can’t really say why he mutes his radio and shifts his seat on the tower’s frame.  Maybe he’s bored.  Maybe The List is getting so long he’s finally starting to lose his head.  Maybe he’s fucking pissed that Connor’s dragging Kyle into this stupid bad habit, this incessant chatter that might distract Kyle long enough to get him killed.  “Your mother.  Who I tried to kill before you were born, wasn’t that it?”

For a long minute, Connor actually goes quiet.  

The Resistance doesn’t know; Marcus is pretty fucking certain that Kate is the only other person that was privy to both that particular conversation and to why Connor’s so focused on Kyle while trying to keep it subtle.  Yeah, it might be the ass-end of the apocalypse, but there’s still a difference between following someone who was  _ crazy _ and following someone who is straight up  _ batshit _ .  

He looks right at Marcus, stares into him with an intensity that Marcus remembers the pinch of chains.  Marcus stares back, because if he’s going to stick around in this scorched hellhole of radioactive dust and ammunition, then he’s going to drag some sense out of Connor, piece by piece.  

“My mother could find a way to have pancakes anywhere,” he says, steady as the metal around them.  “It didn’t matter if we were in a condo in Sacramento or camping in Mexico, or hiking with guerillas in Nicaragua, she’d find some church giving a breakfast or she’d make batter with powdered MREs and cook them over a campfire.  Sure, it would taste as bad as it sounds, but it was still  _ pancakes _ .  It wasn’t like she was doing it because I liked them.  I don’t even think  _ she _ liked them.  Now, looking back… I think it was something to keep the two of us convinced that we were going to be okay.  Nothing was going to change so badly that we couldn’t keep having pancakes… not even Judgment Day.”

It’s not ‘you are the Resistance’, but everyone’s listening, even Marcus.  He watches Connor’s smile never quite reach his eyes. 

And Connor laughs, dusty and with a little bit of pain.  “And then she’d tell me to clear the dishes so I could learn how to make plastique for pipe bombs.”

The other lookouts laugh, and Tech-Comm laughs, and Kyle just says, “ _ Oh _ .”

He hears it in Kyle’s voice, and Marcus watches John hear it, too; Marcus watched a metal beam get punched through Connor’s chest, and apparently it hurt  _ less _ than hearing that one little syllable of far-off wonder over a scratchy radio channel.

Not for the first time, Marcus decides that John Connor’s utterly fucking nuts… but he is not a liar.

There’s a second list in Marcus’ head, though it’s smaller, shorter.  It’s called ‘John Connor’.  Marcus closes his eyes, sees it in his head like it’s something he can touch, something real and not so much fucking  _ code _ , and adds a new line.

 

_ Sarah Connor _


	3. Muscle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for a little bit of body horror in this chapter.

The sound of the HK hitting the ground is nothing compared to the blast when its turbines choke and jam on so much hard-packed soil.  It shrieks, splitting air and plate steel alike in a rippling bloom of bright orange fire.  

There’s no time for Marcus to think, only to  _ move _ .  He grabs Barnes’ collar in one hand and Connor’s belt in the other, twists and throws them both back behind the burned-out tank that was their cover in the first goddamn place (or it was before Connor saw the HK adjust its flightpath for the satellite dish they’d finally reclaimed for Resistance use).  He manages to shift his weight, to look and make sure they’ve landed safely and  _ not _ on top of Barnes’ rocket launcher, but then the first rush of air whips his long coat to one side and the blast wave reaches them.  

Pain’s a funny thing now.  Marcus remembers it more than he  _ feels _ it. It’s like a momentary burst of static across his nerves, and then it’s just white noise.  The ringing in his ears is worse, really.  He coughs, tastes a film of jet fuel on his tongue and spits it out.  Wriggles fingers, toes, counts them all as present and functional, so he wobbles upright.  

The HK is scrap.  There’s a few chunks of panelling missing from the satellite dish, plus most of a smoking turbine blocking the control panel, but it’s still standing, so there’s something. 

“- _ hheees _ us H. Christ.”  The ringing clears like time returning to its normal speed again, and Marcus rolls his eyes as he turns around.

“Yeah, you’re welcome,” he snaps, but Barnes isn’t staring at the precious and miraculously spared dish.  His eyes are round and wide, and fixed right on Marcus.

Marcus glances down, and there’s a piece of shrapnel this size of his fucking arm punched into his left side.  There isn’t any pain, but it’s not numb either.  It’s just… there.   _ Stuck _ in him, pressing rust and twisted edges against his lowest rib, and maybe his… yeah.  He sucks a shuddering breath, and there’s that shiver of it grating against his spine. 

“Mother _ fuck _ ,” he wheezes, and it doesn’t sound as steady as he feels.  Something inside catches as he breathes, sparking a delayed warning from the ruined cortex chip at the back of his skull.  It’s  _ in _ him.  It’s--

“Barnes.”  Connor coughs, and spits out that foul taste of Skynet’s blood, too.  “ _ Barnes _ .  Go make sure that thing’s transponder is destroyed, and confirm the dish is still online with Tech-Com.   _ Now _ , soldier!”

The edge in barked order stirs the other man to moving.  Marcus hears Barnes’ boots crunch over scorched earth and kick bits of debris aside; hears, because he’s still looking at the piece of the dead HK’s turbine stabbing him in the gut.  It should hurt.  Fuck, he  _ wants _ it to hurt.  Wants right then to feel  _ something _ instead of the indifference of a machine under his skin.  He puts his hands around it, wraps his fingers tight until this skin on his right palm starts to bleed.  The spark fades too briefly, so he starts to pull and his head rings with an emergency  _ bleat _ as something pulls  _ with it _ \--

“Stand down, Wright.  Stop.”  Connor’s hands in those fingerless gloves land over his, stilling Marcus.  “Hey.  Seems a little familiar, doesn’t it?”

Connor’s shit sense of humour puts a dent in the panic, enough for Marcus to look up and meet his gaze.  

“You don’t want to do that.  Trust me on this;  _ don’t _ just yank this one out.”  The half-smile is wry and completely  _ not _ -funny, not when it tugs at Connor’s scars like that.  “Seriously, Wright, where did you learn first aid?”

Okay, maybe it’s a little funny, and Marcus’ next breath is a little like a laugh.  “Death row.”

“No shit.  Let me get that out properly before you break something.”

In the shadow of a burned-out tank, Connor uses a utility knife to slice open Marcus’ skin and carefully ease it away from the protruding metal and its ragged edges.  The shape and angle of the shard means that he has to lay on his side, so Marcus cranes his neck to the left and keeps his eyes locked on the blue-grey sky of midmorning.  

There’s a slightly wet noise of tissue peeling away from endoskeleton, and Marcus shivers in reflex.  Cold air.  There’s cold air  _ inside _ his ribs again.  The metal shifts, clinks somewhere Marcus doesn’t want to look.  

“Sorry.”  Connor doesn’t quite sound like he means it.  “It’s snagged somewhere further in.”

“You eyeing up my undercarriage, Connor?”  Marcus fishes for something barbed and inappropriate, but there’s another cut, another shiver, and now it’s  _ warm _ inside that mess of cables that make up Marcus’ guts.  Warm like a human body should be warm.  

Something not-metal brushes against his spine.  “Wait, what are y--”

“ _ Easy _ ... easy, Marcus.  Don’t move.”

Yeah.  Jesus H. Christ.  John Connor’s got his  _ hand _ inside Marcus.  

He can’t breathe, can’t swallow, in case he moves the wrong way.  He doesn’t have any soft and vulnerable viscera anymore, but he can still  _ feel _ it, close and intimate.  All the skin he has that’s not torn up is  _ tingling _ , goosebumps rising tight and high.  Connor keeps his fingers tight together as he sinks deeper in, slowly following the edge of the shrapnel until he finds the snag ( _ primary circulatory conduit,  _ reads some inhuman buzz in the sudden silence of his brain) and slowly eases it back, over.  Clear.  Reaches back in, slides his fingertips all the way down the conduit and gives a little twist to make sure it’s secure.  

There’s a void in Marcus when Connor eases his hand free, then carefully draws the metal piece out with both hands.  He tosses it aside and Marcus finally heaves a breath.  “F-fucking  _ warn _ me,” he stammers.  “Buy a guy a drink at least.”

Connor snorts and wipes his fingers on his pantleg.  “You didn’t buy _ me _ a drink.  Now hold still.”

Marcus gave Connor a hell of a lot  _ more _ than a drink, but he doesn’t quite trust his tongue right then to say it.  He’s… that was… fuck.  Something.

The stab and slide of needle and stiffened thread feels distant and impersonal after that.  The alarm’s quiet, but Marcus hates that a part of his mind can still tell when each stitch is not quite even, not mathematically perfect.  He curls his lip at the empty sky.  “Seriously, Connor, where the hell did you learn to stitch someone up?”

He hears Connor’s smile.  “My uncle.”  There’s something distant in the way he says it, and Marcus looks away from the sky before he can help it.  

The hole in Marcus’ torso is nearly closed.  There’s no metal to be seen, only an ugly star-burst scar that pinches as it starts to heal.  Connor’s bare fingertips are slick with so much drying red, tugging the curved needle up between a set of needlenose pliers for the last few stitches.  He  _ is _ smiling, pulling those scars into something like laugh lines as the sun starts to clear the side of the tank.  

He didn’t smile that way when he talked about Sarah Connor.  

The wheels in Marcus’ head spin, like they could grind up all these weird clues and finally get an answer to that damn riddle.  Between the things he hears and the things Kyle tells him, Sarah Connor’s name is whispered and prayed to when soldiers think no one’s around.  There’s murmurings of contacts Connor has all over the world, old friends from Mexico to South Africa and Siberia whether they’re officially considered Resistance or not, but funny, no one’s mentioned any other members of Connor’s family.  Marcus tries pulling a thread of his own.  “Your uncle,” he repeats flatly, like disbelief can prickle Connor into elaborating.

“The day I first met my Uncle Bob, I ended up helping dig about a dozen bullets out of his back.”  Connor meets Marcus’ gaze, and there’s something daring in the way he tilts his chin up.  Not smug, but mischievous.  “Y’know, practical stuff for a nine year old.”

Marcus likes to think he’s not a complete idiot, but Connor’s dangling something for him again; better to bite now, where Barnes and Kyle and the rest of the world can’t hear it.  As Connor snips the final stitch with the cutters on the pliers, Marcus puts his hand, his bare metal hand on Connor’s wrist.  “I’m not the first one, am I.”  Before Connor can reply, Marcus adds a little more pressure.  “I’m not  _ your _ first one.”

Connor might wear a seasoned war mask for his soldiers, but he’d be shit at poker.  Marcus sees the mischief go tired in his eyes.  His sigh’s as lonely a sound as the wind over the empty desert.  He glances down at that bare hand, the dark metal a stark contrast against his bloody gloves, then meets Marcus’ gaze and shakes his head just enough to be an answer.

It still doesn’t quite make sense, but what does, nowadays?

Barnes is coming back, stomping heavy and loud over the heat-crisp earth.  Transponder’s burned, the dish is functional, time to go before aerostats locate the HK wreckage.  Connor shifts his grip in Marcus’ hand to help pull him back upright, the mask back in place.

Marcus’ shirt’s mostly ruined, so he pulls his long coat forward in hopes the shadows hide the stitches as they walk.


End file.
